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Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
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This post is part of the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) series by Rethink Priorities — a sequence of articles dedicated to effective giving across philanthropic areas.
TL;DR:
There is a seemingly plausible argument that do...
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FYI: METR is actively fundraising!
METR is a non-profit research organization. We prioritise independence and trustworthiness, which shapes both our research process and our funding options. To date, we have not accepted payment from frontier AI labs for running evaluations. ^[1]
Part of METR's role is to independently assess the arguments that frontier AI labs put forward about the safety of their models. These arguments are becoming increasingly complex and dependent on nuances of how models are trained and how mitigations were developed.
For this reason, it's important that METR has its finger on the pulse of frontier AI safety research. This means hiring and paying for staff that might otherwise work at frontier AI labs, requiring us to compete with labs directly for talent.
The central constraint to our publishing more and better research, and scaling up our work aimed at monitoring the AI industry for catastrophic risk, is growing our team with excellent new researchers and engineers.
And our recruiting is, to some degree, constrained by our fundraising - especially given the skyrocketing comp that AI companies are offering.
To donate to METR, click here: https://metr.org/donate
If you’d like to discuss giving with us first, or receive more information about our work for the purpose of informing a donation, reach out to giving@metr.org
However, we are definitely not immune from conflicting incentives. Some examples:
- We are open to taking donations from individual lab employees (subject to some constraints, e.g. excluding senior decision-makers, constituting <50% of our funding)
- Labs provide us with free model access for conducting our evaluations, and several labs also provide us ongoing free access for research even if we're not conducting a specific evaluation.
I agree METR does great work! But I tentatively think it won't be the right donation choice for individual EAs:
That said, for anyone thinking about donating to METR, that still seems like a great (though maybe not optimal) choice!